>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
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>> Guy: Well, good afternoon everyone and thanks for coming to our Books and Beyond Program today. I want to let you know that this is sponsored by the Center for the Book and the Library of Congress and we're the section of the library that promotes books, reading, libraries and literacy nationwide. We have a state center in every state of the union. We even have one here in D.C. and also in the Virgin Islands. And another thing that we do at the Center for the Book is we play a role in the National Book Festival by inviting and organizing the author's program. And I wanted to let you know that this years National Book Festival will be on the National Mall on September 22nd and 23rd. Before we get started I just need to ask that you turn off all your electronic devices, especially your phones and I also want you to know that we're going to be recording this for today for webcasting at a future time. So, if you ask a question, you'll be part of our webcast. If you want to look at this webcast or any others that you may have missed, you can go to read.gov, which is the Library of Congress website or where the webcast for the Books and Beyond programs are held. Also, I want to let you know that the books will be for sale here after the event and also the author will be signing them. So, please take advantage of that and they'll be a Library of Congress 20 percent discount on the book. We are often asked how we determine which books we feature at these books and beyond events and the most important criteria we have is that the author has used the Library of Congress collections in doing his or her research. And today, I want to thank the Prints and Photographs Division, which brought this program to us today and where the author did much of his research. Part of that division is called The Center for Architecture Design and Engineering and I am please to introduce its Founding Director, Ford Peatross. Ford's responsibilities there include bringing attention and support to the more than five million related photographs and other documents in its collections through exhibitions, publications and programs like the one we're having here today. Ford is a fellow of the society of architectural historians and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. He is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of architecture and design and has lectured widely on these topics both in the U.S. and abroad. Ford first came to know the Frances Benjamin Johnston collection as a graduate student in history of art studying early architecture of the American south where Johnston's documentary photographs for the library's Carnegie Survey of Architecture in the South proved an indispensable tool. He has been an enthusiastic proponent of Johnston's talents and achievements since joining the curatorial staff of the library's Prints and Photographs Division in 1975. Ford also provided a preface for the book that will be discussed today and will introduce its author, Sam Watters. Please welcome Ford Peatross.
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>> Ford Peatross: Thank you Guy and we all thank The Center for the Book for sponsoring this program. Welcome one and all on this glorious spring day. What could be more appropriate to celebrate the publication of a beautiful new book on gardens and the launch of over 1100 digital images of gardens online? Well, to be outside would be more appropriate. [Laughter] But this brief interlude will only serve to make you appreciate all the more the next garden you visit. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing your speaker. But before I do, many thanks are in order. The online presentation of over 1100 of Frances Benjamin Johnston's lantern slides launched today; the new book based upon them that we celebrate in today's program, "Gardens for a Beautiful America 1895-1935" are the results of the efforts of many people over a long period of time. First, we thank Frances Benjamin Johnston for making these remarkable images and having the foresight to place them in the Library of Congress ultimately bequeathing her entire archive to the library. We thank Lester B. Holland, the first chief of the library's Fine Arts, now Prints and Photographs, Division who first elicited images from Ms. Johnston in the library's collections in the late 1920's. We thank Helena Zinkham, the current chief of Prints and Photographs for supporting and leading this most recent effort to get Ms. Johnston's colored lantern slides online and the many other staff members in Prints and Photographs, Information Technology Services, the Office of Communications and elsewhere in the library for their contributions. We thank Barry Cenower of Acanthus Press for his diligence and generosity in producing the beautiful publication that's sitting in the back of the room there. And especially to Sam Watters for his passion and scholarship in writing it and in helping the library to identify and catalog all these images over the past five years. Again, we thank the Library Center for the Book and the Prints and Photographs Division for sponsoring today's program. We thank all of you for taking the time to come today. We should also thank Adrienne Higgins of "The Washington Post," Anne Raver of the "New York Times," Architectural Digest" and the many other publications that have been giving such wonderful attention and publicity to the launches. Did you see the spread in the Post this morning?
>> Yes.
>> Ford Peatross: Yes. [Laughter] Now it is my pleasure and I mean that sincerely, to introduce our speaker. Sam Watters is an independent scholar who writes about the culture of houses and gardens. He is the author of numerous essays and books on subjects ranging from cactus theft for suburban backyards to temples of love in the estate gardens of American robber barons, his words. Educated at Yale and in Europe, he lives in Los Angeles and New York. This snippet is much too modest, for I would go further to describe Sam as a sort of Renaissance man, with all the knowledge, talent, skills and good humor necessary to accomplish a daunting task, one that I myself failed at. Sam has not just identified Johnston's garden photographs for the Library of Congress, but he has brought new life to them, new respect to Ms. Johnston's career and achievements and put both in their proper historical, social, economic and artistic context in a way that no one else I know could have done. I cannot express fully the debt that we all owe to him for this accomplishment. But by the end of his presentation today, you certainly will have a better sense of it. For me, personally, it has been a privilege and a pleasure to work with Sam. So, without further delay, I now give you the man of the day who will introduce you to the work of one of the great American women of the last century and don't forget to buy the book.
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>> Sam Watters: Well, I thank all those people that Ford listed and I'm going to get on with this show because I have this rule. I've done a lot of lecturing and the new rule is 35 minutes. That's what you get and you have to answer all of it and so my slide presentations get peeled back substantially, but you're going to get somewhere between Ms. Johnston's 75 slides and 150 slides that she presented. So, some of this I'm going to move through quickly, because I'm going to try and situate Johnston, who she was, because by the time we're going to meet her in the garden she's already 50 years old. And she's had 30 years professionally and I've got to anchor. I'm going to see if we can't anchor ourselves before we get fully into the gardens. I said to the library I'm going to-- this slide I started with the slide of a gate in a garden photograph is always symbolic of something else. It's always-- it's one of those great photographic tropes of what are-- where we're going to go. It's the medieval enclosed garden. You know its Edith Wharton calling her writing a secret garden. And it happens to be the gate into my grandmother's garden. And when you see Lady Bird Johnson there I sort of gave you the beginning of Johnston, the beginning of the idea of the beautiful American garden and then really the culmination of that is going to be with Lady Bird Johnson who is going to go around beautifying America and she is the inheritor of the tradition that Johnston is going to help establish. I said to the library-- the library asked me to talk about a little bit just briefly about how I did this. One of the issues, this is really the question of what does it mean to be uncataloged. I had no idea when I started and I sort of think that Helena Zinkham was a little slippery. Oh, we'll show you the slides and no problem. And I thought oh those will be great and little did I know five years later and what that meant uncataloged, but that's what it looks like and that's how I saw it. And they look like very-- this is sort of the award goes to-- this is a glass lantern slide. And I gave this talk, a version of this talk a few weeks ago and somebody said, what's a glass lantern slide? And I felt, oh that's really, now we are all aging along with Johnston. So here's-- that's what this looked like. And those are some of the slides, and as you see, many of them have no markings and no identification and some have these very abbreviated ones, because Johnston was always in a great rush and obviously she had this all in her head. She never wrote a speech. She talked extemporaneously like I'm doing. So, I'm sort of going off into the entertainment anecdote world, which is where she lived. It was never about history. It was about telling you how to do something and to make America better, but we'll get to that in a minute. So, the way I did this was I really think it's fundamentally just your basic research drudgery. I have read and gone through probably most of the major periodicals that talked about gardens and houses at the turn of the century. This is when they begin to really show up in America at the end of the 1890's, all again, in the same flow of America getting interested in houses and gardens in a new kind of way. And so, that's one example where you see the absolute match up to the photograph and to the magazine. Another way that I did it was that I went and looked at plans of gardens. There was no identification to this slide, hardly notable. What I saw was there's a page from the garden magazine with a little tiny plan about this big. So, you just have to carefully go through, this is-- just read them. And I notice this little plan and I thought, oh this looks like that. Then, this slide this took three years to identify. I know I had a great deal of historians because I went through all the architectural photographs of all the horticultural societies. I couldn't find the architecture. I thought I'll start with the architecture because I'll never find the garden. And what I ended up doing was I read the histories of horticultural societies and I found the description of this garden in that. It was really quite a big deal in the time that it happened. Twenty thousand people went to see this exhibition garden. And then finally the online world, if you navigate that in some way, which I'm doing more efficiently. I actually, this photograph was another one of my-- I was very frustrated in the end of not being able to find this photograph because I know that it wins an award, not credited to Johnston but I could see the description of it, but I couldn't locate where it was and finally what I did was I found a reference to a subdivision in Ohio and I noticed that when they were talking about a photograph in the subdivision, a house in the subdivision they had a photograph of a wall and on the wall was a newspaper clipping with the photograph in the clipping. It certainly-- it's sort of embarrassing to tell that story. And then, finally, I went to see many gardens. I probably have seen 90 percent and gone to find them, what remains of them. Here's one of my fine photographs. There's a wonderful landscape of photography here. Richard Levine who schlepped out to go see this and his photographs came back absolutely glorious and there's one of my fine photographs to show you that you can see that some of it still remains but you see that Johnston is doing this much more artistically and we'll come back to that in a minute, but please notice the hay in the barrel. So, here we are. Here's Frances Benjamin Johnston as she looked at 50 years old. And there she is in the field photographing Biltmore. So, this is a real world of a kind of gentility and she's going to make a living in it. And I want to come back-- I will come back to that but I want to-- oh then I'll just point out, this is where she lived here in Washington. She, by the turn-- by this article in 1905 there's the cover of "Washington Life" with her house on the cover. And she lived-- she was a great self-promoter. She had to be because nobody else was going to pay any attention because photographers lived-- commercial photographers did not quite have-- didn't have the status of fine artists. So, Johnston always used this house as a beginning of her own story, because the garden was-- it was a house built by John Burroughs, the great naturalist. And Johnston annexed herself to anybody famous. She was always very strategic in making certain that you knew these kind of connections. Now, her father was very friendly with John Burroughs and she lived in this rose garden and so this is a great promotional piece. And please note what it said, which is that this is gardens of a sort of a perfect model of backyard civic beauty. So, it's already beginning the world that she's going to enter and she's very conscious of it. I'm just going to go through these slides. By the time Johnston reaches being a garden photographer, she's been a photo journalist and then she became a portrait, a portrait photographer. And what she's going to do is she's going to track the-- the commercial viability of different aspects of photography. So, this is not one of these-- this is not the modern day photography career, which is I'm a fine artist career like Cindy Sherman and I get to stay in this one discipline. They had to migrate through the disciplines in order to make a living because the idea of the art photographer was still very marginal in this period. So, she-- by the time she is photographing gardens she has met and photographed an extraordinary array of very powerful and very connected people and I'm just going to go through some of this. Let me see if I can see. You have the famous Washington Barbizon painter Max Weyl. You have Charles McKim who's going to work with Roosevelt, McKim, Mead, and White. You have George Bancroft the great American historian. Here you have the artists and writers. You have the opera singer Geraldine Farrar. You have Eadweard Muybridge the photographer and you have Frances Hodgson Burnett, who was the first subject portrait of Johnston, famous writer of a children's book about children in a garden. You have Andrew Carnegie. She competes for the famous photographs that get put into Andrew Carnegie's libraries and she loses the competition and he is very scornful of her photograph. But I think she got it pretty basically here and Frank Vanderlip who was a big banker in New York and becomes a big developer of land in Los Angeles. And all these people and then there's President William McKinley. This is the last photograph of McKinley taken alive, which made her an enormous amount of money because she was able to license it in postcards and made, you know, spread her reputation in an international scope. And then there is Teddy Roosevelt and she becomes very close to Roosevelt in photographing his family when they first arrived at the White House and all the famous photographs with the macaws and the dogs and the ponies and all that you know retinue of what Roosevelt brought. And he or she, there's the great naturalist, the great promoter of the preservation of the American landscape is Gifford Pinchot and Booker T. Washington, the great educator. Now, all these people got along pretty well and as you see here you have Andrew Carnegie at Booker T. Washington's 25th anniversary of his institute, of his college and there they all are on the grandstand. And Johnston's there, so she's going to see this new world of progressive life that is evolving in America and they get along and sometimes they don't get along. And you have Ida Minerva Tarbell who wrote the two volumes, which dismantled the Standard Oil Trust and you have Jacob Riis who's going to write "How the Other Half Lives." Now Johnston is going to take a certain interest in "How the Other Half Lives", but now we're going to get to where we land. So, I'm going to now play you a little clip, which we-- hope will work. I want you-- this is how Johnston would have heard this song and then I'll talk a little bit about it. Let's just--
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>> [ Singing ] O beautiful for patriot dream
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>> Listen carefully to this.
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[Singing ] That sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, Undimmed by human tears.
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>> [Singing] America, America, God shed his grace on thee. And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.
>> So, the significant part about this, which becomes this national anthem by 1900 is that it is written by a woman who goes to this Chicago fair, which is the Alabaster City and she travels across and goes to Pike's Peak and stays in Colorado. And she is one of those figures like Johnston, who comes of age after the Civil War when women, professional middle class and upper middle class women are able to enter the workforce for reasons of industrialization and the change in how American households are going to evolve as a result of women not having to produce all the farm work and sit home and knit. Not all women, this is a certain class and Katharine Lee Bates and Frances Benjamin Johnston are going to be of this generation and she goes to Wellesley, which is one of the first colleges for women in America founded in 1874 and Johnston is also going to become an educated woman. So, they're tracking this building, which is the woman's building, which is put together by the very wealthy Ida Honore-- Bertha Palmer. She looks like the fairy godmother here. I mean its Glinda the Good Witch who is-- I mean it's extraordinary. She's holding some kind of plant and anyway this portrait was done at the same time as the fair and she puts together this enormous building and she stands up at the beginning of the fair and says that women are now going to evolve beyond this role of being a clipped hedge to be this groomed, it's a whole metaphor about gardening and women kept in this defined roles, but now they're going to be able to break out of them. And Johnston goes and photographs the fair and its very substantial because women are now going to be able to play role in the culture beyond one that they had been sequestered into, which is inside working on farms or doing certain kinds of domestic labor. They're going to branch out into all sorts of new professions and one of them is going to happen as they get to educate people and they're also going to get to photograph and they're going to become landscape architects. That's a substantial part of this in this evolution, among the professions. Now, so everybody is going to talk about America the Beautiful and we're all going to get along and you know you heard that God fearing, all those words that came out of that-- the Alabaster City, the patriot's dream you know you're going to have-- you're going to have a world untainted by human tears, which means industry is involved. But, not everything is going to come out so well. And one of the things that leaves an enormous impression over the 20 million people that went to the Chicago fair was they're all going to go home and start saying we have to improve America and one reason that they're going to do this is because this is what they're living in. I mean America in the degraded, in the industrialism in the wake of the Civil War and the railroads and all sorts of-- and the rise of the steel industry. The cities are and the country sides are very, are diminished by what is an ongoing pollution and unregulated, unfettered capitalism of the period. Now, so we've got the large idea that America is not looking too great. I mean, these-- the literature for this is extensive and people talk about riding, going into the countryside, go home and they see it lined with billboards. They talk about the pollution of water all the way through the country sides, enormous loss of wildflowers. This is a well-- this is greatly discussed in the leading up to the fair and then in the wake after the fair, because the City Beautiful movement is now going to come into full fruition in the period. Really it's really from 1900 forward. Now, in this stratus-- in this stratified-- this is a stratified social world. Some people are going to live at the very top, we would say the one percent. This was really the beginning of the one percent. And here you have the world of the Vanderbilt's living next door with enormous fortune out of railroads and they live in houses that have rooms like this. And this is one of Johnston's earliest first clients and they have gardens like that. That woman, that was her city house and this is her country, minor country garden photographed in 1914 in Newport. All blue and white and so we'll come back to that in a little bit. Okay, other people, the bottom, the other-a the bottom were the tenements and they were living-- this is a famous photograph by Jacob Riis who wrote, "How the other Half Lives" and I think the other part was being generous and you can see that in this very-- this is going to create an enormous tension in the culture and very rich people are going to become very aware of this in this time of-- of the begin-- the photography is going to have a big impact because Jacob Riis goes into these at night and photographs this and then publishes these photographs. And suddenly what's very private is going to become very public. So, the photograph is going to play a big role in this and here-- and here's what-- that's what Delancey Street looked like, so you would have these two things not far from one another in New York, and this is true all over in American cities, Pittsburgh, Chicago you saw. And the response of the rich in this progressive period is going to be at one to distance themselves, to continue to distance themselves from it, which is the great enormous amounts of the estate building and on the other hand to fund the revival of the cities, which they happen to be sort of leaving, but that's going to get reconciled in the 1920's. One of the great projects in the City Beautiful I just note is Washington, D.C. because the rise of city planning is going to happen in this period and the rise of city-- the City Beautiful is going to have city planning. It's going to have enormous public institutions, a metropolitan museum, the natural history museums all over America, the Carnegie libraries, all of this is going to be part of this and the big plan that puts together for Roosevelt by-- with Charles McKim involved is this reorganization or the reestablishment of Washington according to L'Enfant. Now, into this women step. So, we have these women, women now are able to enter the public sphere. They have a new empowerment because they're going to have intellectuals on this side. They're going to have artists like Johnston and rich women are going to bring all of these people together. And they're going to do this in the realm that women were associated with, which is the community and the garden and the house. That's-- and it's very interesting when you read it in the period because these are the women of enormously rich people. These are Rockefellers and Harrimans and Goulds. These have the enormous fortunes and, of course, there's some irony that they're going to now clean up what their own husbands created, but that's a little part that I left out of my garden talk tour. [Laughter] So, here they are, one of the great figures in this is Mrs. Frances King on the left in her own garden and then you see the Garden Club of America ladies all piled onto a train. They were-- they were cultivators of their own garden and cultivators of the culture of gardening and the Garden Club of America is par excellence the group that you wanted to be associated with and it happens that it was founded the same year that Johnston becomes a professional garden photographer with her associate Mattie Edwards Hewitt, which was a partnership that lasted about six years. So, this timing is probably absolutely why she starts really in earnest photographing gardens. And all her clients are going to be on the back of that train. [Laughter] Okay, now on that train was one of those people, one of the people that does this migration, the building of country estates, which they're going to, of course, do on the farmland that has now been completely disenfranchised because the farmers all move into industrial cities and the rich by up their farmland and create these new estates. And here's one of them, which his Killenworth in Long Island, a piece of it still survives. And this is one of the biggest, it has 1000 acres and five or six family members of the Pratt family who all built houses next door to one another. And so they built this new estate and you see it's finished in the same year that Johnston's going to start garden photography. This is one of the first gardens that she photographs and it becomes the model estate. Country life in America assigns this house and garden as the model of American living. Of course, it's interesting and you know the moral of American living for whom, but this is, alright so, and it had a garden like that. Now this is a great American, this is a great intersection between all the European traditions that Americans are going to turn to for this new better America and it also has that aspect of American practicality because they're going to turn this-- this is a swimming pool and it's made to dress up to look like some English canal or sort of vaguely Italian and you know there's never a purity in this. So, at any rate this-- and next door down the road is Mrs. Jennings who has a Standard Oil fortune and who writes her-- her husband writes a letter to Frederick Olmsted in the 1890's when he buys this 120 acres and says you know we just want to do something modest and fix up the back yard. And I mean it's literally language like that and we don't want to do anything that's extreme and so they have Cˆrrere and Hastings build a house and then they have a garden that looks like that. [Laughter] So, you know this modesty was genuine but I mean you're talking to a very elevated group and this is who Johnston's going to serve. And serve it is. She never gets to be a member of a garden club. She is the hired help and one of the things that I was discussing with somebody, which I had a lot of trouble in a lecture. Photographers like Johnston were down below artists and so were landscape architects. And the big struggle is going to be to redefine these professions that are necessary for this beautification in America as art. And, of course, living as a sort of sub-artist is going to have its own struggle and Johnston is going to work very hard to define this new life for herself and to redefine herself as a photographer and they never credited the photographer for photographs, ever. So when these women who own these gardens submitted these to all sorts of exhibitions, they always took the credit for the photograph. So, think about working in this. You're never the owner of the garden club. You have to take care of everybody. They live in fancy places like this. You, you know okay. So, these women do different things. They are going to live in these beautiful houses and they are going to found schools. They're going to found garden clubs. They're going to do exhibition gardens. They're going to have these gardens photographed and put into the journals and magazines of the period and they're going to publish their own journals like the Garden Club of America does this famous bulletin, which still goes on. And they're going to be involved in publishing books and here's the most famous garden book of the period. This becomes a big-- this is really the big nature photo garden book and it's written by a woman and Johnston is the-- always in the two editions is going to be the lead photographer with these color photographs. These are actually from Autochromes. And they're going to have photo exhibitions and Johnston is going to get very involved in this. Now, in those exhibitions they're going to show photographs like this and this is always the balancing act which is theirs on the left, one member's garden and on the right is the janitor's garden. And they're going to show these as equivalents and necessary in the rise of this American culture and this beautification, which we're going to talk a little about. So, they're not, but this-- the garden on the left is always identified as-- it has a name, Flagstones. And it's done by Mrs. Clinton Marshall, who was married to a famous attorney in the period and the garden on the right is always just the janitor's garden. So, there's never the person attached to this, because it was irrelevant. He was just being used as a way to signify the significance of class-- that gardens transcend class. Now that didn't mean that you, if you were the janitor and you planted a good garden you got to be something else. Now this is not-- this is not-- there's not so much migration. There is just the idea that beauty is going enhance America, the cities and this countryside and beauty always has a moral value in this period. This is a moralizing beauty. This is the idea that you are a better person and America is going to be a better country if it's beautiful. I mean these are-- ideas that that's a big simplification, but this has long roots in this, because you think of-- you think of Emerson, Emerson translated God through nature which was about beauty into our own experience of the world. So, this is all going to be very deep in American culture by the time they're going to talk about beauty and what's beautiful and they're going to decide what's beautiful and your ability to really know beauty was-- the people that knew beauty in terms of what Johnston is talking about are artists. And so Johnston is going to play in this. She's a perfect person for this because she's going to be this purveyor of beauty and because she's an artist, she's going to have a sensibility for this. But you can educate people to beauty and that's what this is about. And beauty can be found anywhere if you can recognize it. So, the janitor got recognized for his beautifying of his window boxes. And the last thing they're going to do where they have the exhibitions and the big promo its going to be projection of lantern slides, which is a whole tradition in America from the 1870's and they're used for educational purposes so, absolutely perfect annexing of lantern slides to gardening is a very powerful force in this time, because it's associated with culture and intellectualism. Alright, you show a lantern slide you're an authority and it's the new media, which also makes it exciting. And here you have an architecture class and what is it showing but the front portal of Notre Dame in Paris. This is-- you know this is what everybody is going to be looking at to model their gardens and their houses. And they sold them in rooms like that. They projected those slides in rooms like that and this is where Miss Johnston projected her slides. These are two of the houses where she would travel around with her slides and here are the women who had the gardens photographed, members of the Garden Club of America, both coasts and there they are living in their nice gardens and showing other people how to do that. Okay, so here's Miss Johnston in her 50's, the two photographs that she uses for publicity, which are completely revealing to how she's going to fit in this culture. On the left is the official photograph that she sends around to garden clubs and as you see she's got on the pearls. She's wearing a dress. She's got her hair neatly done and she's wearing the Palmes AcadŽmiques , which was awarded by the French Government for her work at the St. Louis fair and she's got the medal here. There she is proudly and she sends this to newspapers and this is what they're going to run. Then there's the other Johnston, which is the photograph on the right, which is what she gives when she has a profile done by one of the leading garden magazines and when she does this profile she gives them this photograph. And look what she's doing, she's smoking a cigarette and she's wearing what she called her barbaric jewelry and she's in this sort of loose, arty smock and when she has this interview, which is vary rare. There are only two of these interviews that I found, one with Johnston and one with her former partner. And when she does the interview, she writes the editor and says, I really don't care what you say as long as you write a profile that removes me from the banal curse of being just a photographer. So-- and the profile is then going to a talk about all the issues that I've just talked about; the importance of beauty, her sense of herself as a photographer and an artist. She lists all the famous people she knows, which are largely associated with being rich. She tells you about Teddy Roosevelt. She tells you about her background, which I'll just go here where she's educated in the-- in France. She goes to France and comes back, which is sort of a marker for the cultivated American artist. And she comes back and studies in Washington and she is now the famous photographer. So, this is the profile now and I'm going to talk a little bit about these photographs. Johnston knew very well her place in American culture. And here's a photograph that is just very revealing about what she's going to understand about photography. On the left you have a very famous American-- one of the first famous American cyclists. And on the right is Johnston dressed up as a cyclist in a portrait that she takes of herself. And as you see, it's very likely that this is the image that she's looking at, because this was a highly publicized image of this bicycle. So, there are two things to take away. She understood her place as a woman in the culture, because the people that got photographed were men. And the people that were famous in a career were men. And so she turns herself into a man in this to make a comment about that place for herself. The other part about this is that she's going to enlist the trick of the photograph to make something believable. You see this photograph and she's posed herself, but she understands that the photograph can play a trick because in the period people associated a direct correlation between the photograph and the reality we live in. Now, we all know many decades later, that is not the case. But in this period people really believed that if they saw France Benjamin Johnston in a photograph or they saw a garden, they believed that's really how it looked. Johnston understood by the time she's doing these photographs and I think it's within portraiture that she discovers this, which is, oh this complete illusion we can give, which is this is real. And she uses the reality of this to make this very compelling photograph which is, you see, I understand all of this and I'm a man too. You have this sort of double twist of this and this would have been an all inside joke in the period, okay. Alright, so she goes to Paris and she's going to learn about-- she's going to come into photography but she's-- and she's going to come into photography in a period where there's no status or it's a low status, let's put it that way, not artists. Who gets the credit? Who has the status but fine artists, painters, they're at the top of this list. Women could do sculpture by the way. That was an interesting -- fine painting was for men. And here you see that she's going to import into photography all of the composition and aspects of painting as much as she can. And you see in this photograph how close this all is and they're going to-- people in the period are going to understand that. They're going to see that photograph of Miss Brice and they're going to understand that it looks like a painting. The rules were very clear. When you photograph landscape there are many journals that are written about this. There are many books that have come out, because everybody is going to try and define this place of what new photography is going to do. Photography is only 50 years old and they're very clear. And what they do is that they are going to take all the conventions of landscape painting and they're going to-- Johnston and all the people she's associated with are going to bring those traditions and put them inside to the photograph, because that's how this photograph is going to be accepted. Nobody wants-- their idea of what is going to make a good photograph is going to come from very stern ideas of tradition. This was a period of good and bad, in manners, social ideas and certainly in the world of esthetics. I-- somebody said to me, well what's a bad photograph, how good was she? And here I show you two examples. The one on the left is interesting because it's just marginally off. It's a-- there are ones that are much more you know where the difference is much clearer. But, you can see that the one on the left, the center of focus is just slightly off. Johnston and in the world of that kind of alignment and symmetry Johnston puts it right on center and decides to frame up and use the fountain as an anchor. And here's another example of one of her competitors photographing and Johnston on the right, so you can see how they kind align these two things. Okay, so Johnston's going to be a photographer of landscape architecture. She's going to have two people to please in this. She's going to have to please the owners of the houses who are going to know that they want it to look artistic. Those-- they're going to know what's artistic because they're going to know fine art traditions. Then they've got the land-- the rise of the landscape architect and as I said this is the period when professional landscape architects come along and they are going to fall into the same world of academic-- the academic framework of what is good and bad in terms of design. And what's going to be good is that you're going to make landscapes that are pictures. So, there's a diagram for doing-- a diagram from the famous-- a famous textbook for landscape architecture on the left and that's how you're supposed to do a framed view of a mountain and there's Johnston's photograph of a framed view in the mountain. And when they write the text the author says, "Well in no ordinary photograph would you actually ever see this mountain view." And you see that's where the photographer comes in and that's that Johnston with the bicycle because she's going to sit there and she's going to say, okay. I know this because she owned this textbook. She knows all of this and she's going to have to maneuver and manipulate that photograph from the beginning when she takes the photograph to the end when it gets on that slide. She's going to play into this and she's going to all change and alter just how she's going to need to get that framed view. Now, I'm just going to show you this book because I-- this fairly interesting little map. This is the big famous best seller book and it's all about color in the garden. So, we're going to enter the world of color and they don't use photographs to this because photographs are difficult to reproduce in this period, so they use watercolors or oil paintings and here they are. And here's a picture of the-- one of the watercolors. They are two neighbors who do this book. Now, the picture on the left is the plan of the garden and what it shows you are a series of little arrows that correspond to where the painting-- what the painting represents, but they're all views. They're not just any old view. The landscape, the garden was constructed as a series of pictures and Johnston is going to enter this world and construct photographs that represent this series of pictures. Now, the better the landscape architect the clearer the picture was. If-- the less strong the architect was Johnston had to move in and make the pictures. She had to find these photographical moments. And there's a landscape architect who writes her and says, "Well you know a lot of just think you do it a lot better than we actually do because we don't see what you're seeing." [Laughter] So, you know there's a gap. I mean I just want to keep-- there's a gap between what is really the garden, what really the garden looked like we don't know. We know what it looks like in a photograph and that's something to always hold when you look at photographs, be suspicious because there's a long way between you standing in that garden and that photograph being seen on this screen. So, you're going to see an idealized, perfected view. So, that's the photograph, now the slide. Johnston as did other people in the period-- the lantern slide is the beginning of a kind of new media for Americans and the acceptance. The movies are coming along, so you have to think about that that right now in the period that Johnston's working we're going to begin to have-- the competition's going to be the cinematic image and the idea of sequence. We're going to come to this, but these slides were hand painted. They were farmed out to production houses and many of the people-- there were both men and women, but the woman that Johnston used for what we think is most of her-- many of the major slides was a woman and she happened to work at the Museum of Natural History. And you can see how they painted them. They put them on a table. There was a translucency, a piece of glass and the daylight came through and they painted them. And think about what that was to get all that detail into this. I mean this is-- they're using a magnifying glass, but they have always to have to worry about what they're going to look like in a projection. And the way Johnston did this was that you started with a black and white photograph that was then put onto a piece, onto the glass. Here's a black and white photograph on the glass slide. And she then handed instructions to the photo-- to the woman or the man that were painting it and she noted what she wanted in the slide. And so, you went from this, and there's the instructions, to that. Now, there's a-- that woman who was sitting there in Philadelphia painting these never probably likely saw this garden, which was in Santa Barbara. And so, you have to ask yourself well what are we imitating here? I mean what, what is that? That's a long way from a description of I want a little yellow here to actually making a color slide that had to look real right. I mean the idea was that this was going to look photographically real. Now, we see a color photograph and we know there's an enormous space between that photograph that we associate with a kind of photographic reality and this. And where I would place this is with painting because there-- when you look at the slides they're very artistically and carefully pointed out about how that's going to look and if you look at it they're perfectly balanced. There's one photograph, the one that I showed you of-- with the black and white comparison, the one that was off center and you saw the fountain at the end. If you look at that slide very closely there's one white flower. Now, there was more than one white flower in that yard, but that's what they decided to point out and they're going to use fine art to do this because who-- where's the status going to be? Where's the reality for people? What do wealthy people want to see? They're going to want to see paintings. They're going to have a painting esthetic because they don't know that color photography's just beginning. So, this world of what does something look like in color is going to be known to them through painting. And if you're in the business of selling beauty, why don't you sell something-- selling what something looks like in reality is not as appealing as selling something that looks like in some kind of perfected world. And this is pretty perfected as is and it went in many ways. Impressionism is very prevalent in this period right, because you have post impressionist, you have Americans. There's other traditions, but I really place it pretty much in this post impressionist world. You can see the painting on the left and the crab apple on the right. I mean you see the exact same treatment of the grass. You know you never see leaves. You never see weeds. You never see the rake. You never see the lawnmower. You never see the hose. You never see the-- well the gardener you see once in a while as you'll see. But, this is some place, an imaginary world that you're going to use to make America more beautiful. And here is the complete transformation of the slide. There were lots of rules or certain understandings in the period about what people did to photographs and you never see people in these photographs, very rarely and when you do they're for instructional purposes, which was one of the sort of okay ideas. And you see here the gardener transformed into this little we'll call it an impressionist-- post impressionist painting. And look at the dating of the slides. You see Pissaro in a one in 1922 and Johnston's going back and forth between Europe in this period. She knows all this and she actually says it, that her sense of color she refers to herself as having the sense that color-- using color properly was like composing music. And this is one of the great intellectual moments in the 19th Century, which is impressionism. It's going to make all those references to music and it's going to continue right on through into Matisse. So, she's conscious of all that and she's going to use this again to place herself as being an artist and this is pretty artistic. And notice that she's going to pose this person. She must have looked at this man and understood immediately look at this, this looks like a moment out of Van Gough. And just as it was with landscape architecture where there were rules of making the picture there were rules for how you colored a garden and Johnston's going to know those rules and she's going to know the fine art rules. But, the fine art stands in the middle let's put it that way. You've got landscape architecture over here and you have the photographer over here and they're all going to meet at the fine art world and how are they going to color the garden? They're going to use-- they're going to develop manuals for doing this and they're going to refer to painting the garden. So, you can imagine standing in a garden with Johnston with a landscape architect or these-- the ladies on the train and you can imagine that all this language is going to be about their gardens as pictures and paintings and seeing the world in this very artistic way and Johnston's going to enhance it. And when you take these color charts, which one scholar did and I took some other ones and lined them up, you see them-- she colors the slides in alignment with the charts. What was right and wrong in color alignment also became right and wrong what was in the slide. So, you got rid of the inconsistencies and the dead plants and you've got-- you toned it up. Here's a Leicester Holland by the way who Ford mentioned and he writes a book in 1915 about coloring gardens. This was his first foray. He was an architect with a well known Philadelphia architect at the time. And he meets Johnston 34 years later and says, "You know my first interest was gardening." And the year that this is published is the year she gives her first garden lectures-- lantern slide lecture. So, you can see the intersection of these cultures come back together again in the period. And here is an example of the garden colored. I found the landscape plan for that garden on the right. The house still remains, but the garden doesn't. And when you look at the landscape plan and the listing of plants that's not entirely what you're going to see in this slide. So, this slide and you see the Childe Hassam who was very associated with doing some-- a famous set of landscape-- of garden watercolors. You see the alignment between-- you have Johnston's going to take the photograph, it's going to be perfectly composed. It's going to be colored. It's going to be associated with fine art, but so did the landscape architect who commissioned these photographs because we know that he did. These were his-- these were-- he considered this among his best photographs and he commit-- he ordered these slides to be sent and made many, many prints of them. And he sorted this out between the-- she worked for this man, his name was Clarence Fowler and she did many landscape photographs for him, but this was one of his favorites. So, this is a good example of everybody agreeing as to what is really good and beautiful. So, you've seen the fine art part. You've seen the perfection. You've seen this world of beauty that they're going to show to Americans and these models. But, just go back to the tricky photograph part, you know, the fake bicycle portrait. These slides are always encoded with other issues that we don't know, but if we figure them out we understand something more about landscape. Here's a couple of examples. The one on the left when the Olmsted Firm gets to this garden, which they worked on over a series of years to a very difficult and disagreeable and extremely rich oil client who moved around their plans. They get there and there's a great interoffice memo and John, John Olmsted writes back and says basically this is a mess, because when we put the pergola garden here and when he built the house he pushed it off alignment. So, you look at this photograph and you think nice view. But, what she's done she can never show you the house because it doesn't align with the garden and she knows that. And there's no photograph ever do you see this house. And he-- she was commissioned to go and do this. She does five or six slides and every one of them is something other than the house, you never see the garden in relationship to the house. She shoots it from the angle because obviously she's up in some second floor window and she's shooting it at an angle. And then when she goes to the other side of the garden she shoots these kind of oblique angles of the fountain and of the pergola, but you never see the house. So, I would say that she's going to make this adjustment in a period where things were supposed to line up and the photograph on the right about people. You look at this and you think here's Mrs. Wickham and her nice box hedge and that's-- that-- Johnston puts Mrs. Wickham there to tell you how big the hedge is. It's not about Mrs. Wickham. So, this is, this is a coded world that people responded to and they discussed this. I mean it's in the, it's in the literature of the period about how we're going to sort this out. So, when you look at these photographs always keep that in mind about what are you really being shown and what is the real understanding and what might you not being shown. That's the other part that's always left out of this. And then there are the movies. The movies are going to come along, Johnston is going to get very interested in trying to make movies, but she moves on, the depression comes and that, that ends this for other-- and other reasons. But, here you see that one of the ways to really make the experience of walking through a garden or understanding the garden of the design is to go and follow the sequence of actually walking through it. And here's the garden walking sequence and there are several of those and she gets better at it in the 19-- in the 19-- from about 1917-1920's and this is clearly a very cinematic experience because they would never see the slides this way. They would see the slides one after another and she does this over and over again and she's going to do that walking through and she's going to show you those sequence of pictures that she imagines or maybe had been told are in that garden just like you saw that plan. Okay, so we have these-- did any of this do any good is the question. You have these beautiful photographs, which you can look at in the book and look online. And the issue is how much of this purveying of beauty and an instruction in landscape design did this push America forward in the world of a kind of proto-environmentalism or conservation, and it did. And that's the part of-- leaving out the disparity of the class issues. It's-- there was good done. These women on the train and Miss Johnston were very involved in the replanting of train stations, of prison yards, of parks, of back-- their own backyards, backyards of towns, the movement is enormous. And here's an example, this is the-- one of the great industrial enterprises of the date and the international-- the National Cash Register Company in Dayton and you can see there's the before shot and then you can see it after planted by the Olmsted Firm and worker gardens. Here is what-- Johnston did something which is an interesting tradition with a long history, which is that she'd always show you the before photograph in black and white and then show you the garden in color. [Laughter] So, you had this sort of blooming-- you know this little sort of metaphor for the garden blooming and here she has this photograph that she used, which I like the back of it, the typical rear yard view. Typical was one of those great phrases in the period. If it wasn't important and it wasn't interesting for various reasons usually having to do with status and wealth and who owned it, it was just typical. You could [Inaudible] down a street and it would just be typical. And this is all over America, that kind of-- that language. And here you have Turtle Bay Gardens, which is not typical. This is created by a very wealthy woman from around I forget the exact number, 20 townhouses in New York and it still exists today and many famous people have lived here, Katherine Hepburn and Stephen Sondheim still lives there and you can see that's the owner's garden. And then you had this big revival in native plant gardening and this is a native plant garden out on the cape and it was lived in by a native Washingtonian whose-- actually whose father comes here-- grandfather comes here in the 1820's and becomes the leading florist in Washington and then he becomes a big land owner. And his daughter her-- the-- her-- the granddaughter was married to a famous Washington doctor and she becomes very involved in the DAR, which is a big center of focus to these women. And she plants this native plant garden and this is where Johnston stayed when she went traveling around in New England in the 1920's and you see the native plant garden. And finally, what did Johnston do about all this for herself? She never has a garden aside from her childhood garden and she retires to New Orleans in 1947 and she buys a house there. And you see on the bottom left is how it looked when she bought it and then you see what she does to it on the right. And she restores this and it struck me when I was working on this, if you see the top photograph, it's a little small but that's an exhibition garden by one of these women's groups in 1921 in New York. And what they showed was a tenement, a little model and it-- not a model you walked into it. It was in one of these flower shows, big flower shows where there are all these miniature gardens and you had the tenement and then you had the tenement fixed up. And she's going to do that herself and she's going to enlist many of the broad landscape ideas, the water fountain-- the pool aligned with the porch, the plants at the end, all centered to try-- and she's-- so, you're going to see her. She's going to live in her own tenement renovation in the end of her life. And she refers to herself at the very-- very near the end of her life she refers to herself as sitting there drinking-- taking care of her goldfish and drinking bourbon and refers to herself as an octogeranium [Laughter] having retired to this. So, you know this is-- so people did learn and it did change the world. It changed the world according to lots of ideas that were very established. It was hierarchical. And it had at the core of it what was beautiful. Now, we've lost-- not lost, we have new ideas about what's beautiful and not beautiful and we've changed those for several reasons and some of it is the downside. I'm going to tell you some of the back-- the downside of all of this. It changed gardens. It made them better. It made the landscape better and it certainly raised the consciousness of Americans as to what their countryside and what backyards and cities, our parks could look like. But, it also had the effect of enormous conformity. And you look at these photographs here, on the left is a very famous landscape architect who really does the first very well known photo book, a book of gardens-- with photographs in them. And this is a photograph of one of his paintings and there's Johnston's photograph and they're almost identical and that obviously has lots of implications that you can go home and think about. And you know who's looking at whom and who's copying what and who-- what. Did it matter? See we put a lot of premium on that kind of idea of originality, but what happens in a period when conformity was what was important and what did that mean? And you've got the rise of modernity in all of this, which we didn't have any time to talk about. But, this is a pressure that's going to lean on this world of conforming. Here's a garden on the right in Millbrook, New York and there's something close to the model for that garden. So, the garden, the gardens began to look like other people's gardens. They looked like European gardens. They looked like their neighbor's gardens. And then the photographs because they always followed the rules, they began to look like you couldn't tell the difference between what was an old garden and a new garden. The world of reality of understanding the world pictorially is going to get very, very complicated and it's one of those legacies that we have to hold onto. They remembered the truth of this. They believed what they saw was fact. But, what's going to happen is that you're going to move increasingly away from fact into people starting to worry about the photograph and the reality that the photograph is going to live in and this is a major intellectual crisis in America by the 1960's. By the 1960's there's going to be a book published that is going to analyze what has happened to America and the new crisis is going to be that nobody experiences the world anymore expect through the photograph. And that is an enormous shift and Johnston's at the beginning of that. And that's going to come out of seeing lantern slides and magazines and movies and suddenly the new crisis is going to be not that we lost the world of Thoreau and Emerson, but that we now don't even know it anymore because the only way we know it is through a photograph. And you can see that the problem is that when the photograph, when Italy looks-- when a Millbrook looks like Italy [Laughter] or Italy looks like Millbrook where's the reality of this. That's going to be a big questioning. Those kind of issues are going to come along and it's going to come along out of this period. Now, I'll leave you with one last thing. This is a photograph to show you that we don't live in this world anymore because Johnston could never have taken the photograph on the right not-- because the photograph on the right is the consciousness to that photographer Lee Friedlander who's very well known. He's going to see-- he's going to tell you I want you to know I'm looking at a photograph. Johnston is never going to put a branch in the front of anything because she wants you to have that view into something. So, there's going to be a substantial shift in this. Friedlander is the post recognition that the photograph is never quite what you see. I'm going to leave you with this question, beauty is a-- becomes a bad-- a conceptually dismantled in the post war-- we'll put it into the post war, second post war period. And the question is, every time I talk to anybody they say, oh but the slides are so beautiful. So, what happened? If we still recognize it and they still have an effect on us is it nostalgia or is there something real and believable in beauty? And that's what I want you take-- that's the question. The big question to ask, is there something ineffable about what is beautiful? And you look at this photograph and or this one and you wonder maybe they were right. Maybe it did change things. Maybe this is something we have to consider. That's heresy by the way to say that today. Any rate, that's a little introduction to Johnston. It's a kind of a menu of look out, what you're looking for. There's good and bad in these things. The beautiful is deceptive, but the beautiful was very progressive and may we all see a little more beauty and thinking about these issues in the future. Thank you.
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>> Guy: We have time for a few questions if you'd like.
>> Sam Watters: Yea, I'd be glad to answer them. Yea?
>> How were the ladies on the train able to use a Johnston photo without giving credits ^M01:05:06
[ Inaudible audience question ]
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>> Sam Watters: Right. They didn't have the-- they paid for the photographs. They commissioned the photographs. They were there's. They didn't-- magazines didn't credit photographers, I mean very unevenly. It was-- it's like getting your shoes fixed. It was a tool. It wasn't art right, yea I know, tricky. Yea?
>> Is the collection that's at the Library of Congress representative of all of Johnston's work or are there pockets of photographs elsewhere?
>> Sam Watters: No, she-- the, the-- I mean you find her photographs in other collections, but if you-- they are here. She really carefully-- well, in her way made certain they all came here, which is remarkable. And the unique thing about the lantern slide collection is that I figure it's about seventy percent complete. So, you have something very special, which is one photographer and a lantern slide collection that has essentially a beginning and an end. So, you have this and remember that the important part about this slide collection is she chose it. We know what she-- she's the one who sat around. They were expensive to produce and they selected out-- she selected this is what I think is a good photograph. So, that's why you can use it and talk about well this is a really good one right because she's not going to show you what she thought was a bad photograph. So, you have that world of a kind of judgment in there, which is very hard right, because in most slide collections which have taken-- have been trashed is really a bad-- this is a discipline with a lot of problems in it. They were just acquired anonymously. You had all these photographers in big institutions and they, they supplied the institution photographs and there are no credit, there are no labels and you don't know who chose it. Any?
>> Does she represent a group of women who are [Inaudible]?
>> Sam Watters: Yes she did. The professional landscape garden photograph really comes of age because of publication, so you need really magazines and the halftone printing process in order to get this to happen. You need landscape architecture. You need house building. You need city beautification. You need all these things to compel this and women are going to be able to find a place for themselves in photography and in the garden it's just a double. You know this has a-- this is really a dynamic that's going to work for women. It's not just women who do photographs I mean that-- but there are well known garden photographers are women. Johnston's in the really the beginning of this. This becomes a really big-- there's a-- the profession grows substantially by the late 1920's and that's when she moves out of it. She's very clever because it gets more competitive and crowded and by the 1930's she's photographing buildings in the south. She's understood-- she's understanding this and she's 65. I say-- point out, she's born two years-- she's born a year before the end of the Civil War and she dies after Nagasaki. Think of-- and she works from the 1890's to the 1940's. Think of sustaining that professional independent career all that time as a photographer and she never married. Yea?
>> Was she working in Washington at the same time as Beatrix Farrand?
>> Sam Watters: She is. She's about to go out of that-- the gardening world. But, she knows Farrand and she goes-- she actually on Farrand's recommendation in 1921 she goes and takes a trip through New England and she goes and visits Farrand and sees the garden. Farrand was-- hires Johnston exactly in that mode that I was talking about, the landscape architect. Now, Farrand's a great figure. One of the first landscape-- professional landscape women, so model you know everything right. Landscape women, landscape architect early, upper class, very successful and she hires Francis Benjamin Johnston because she says to Johnston, "You can do things that the photographer I normally hire can't do because you bring this poetry to the landscape photograph" because Farrand's a great example of that. Any other questions, okay thank you.
>> Thanks again.
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>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.